The Arches of the Years was published in 1932, when its author, Halliday Sutherland was 50 years old. It was a best-seller in 1933. Sutherland was a medical doctor and successful author. In his youth he wrote three books in the field of medicine, about birth control and tuberculosis, culminating in the Tuberculin Handbook, published in 1936. In his later years, the 1930s and 40s he wrote several travelogues, about travels to Spain, Ireland, Lapland and the home countries.

The Arches of the Years is a memoir which describes his youth in rural Scotland at the turn of the century: beautiful descriptions of nature and the people with the nostalgic touch of the glance over the shoulder at a world that no longer existed. The writing style of Sutherland reminds of the novels of Hugh Walpole, that popular author of the Edwardian period. Sutherland describes how as a teenager his was lazy at school and his father sent him to relatives in Spain to prepare for his examinations. These descriptions are colourful and full of Spanish caprice as the young Sutherland struggles to learn his first words in Spanish, a lively stay of three months which created a lifelong interest in Spain and successfully prepared him for his examinations, back in Scotland.

The middle section of The Arches of the Years is dedicated to Sutherland's second, longer stay in Spain, as a young man in his mid-twenties. It describes life in Spain at that time, around 1907, and gives very detailed descriptions of the ceremony, rituals and traditions of Spanish bullfighting. The last part of the book describes the author's time in the navy during the First World War, relating various anecdotes and adventures and dangers of the submarine war, and lifting the veil on a German invasion of Britain in 1917.

Halliday Sutherland is quaintly old-fashioned, and some of his jokes are no longer that funny. Incidentally, The Arches of the Years was published in the same year as Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway, and both books describe the Spanish bullfight traditions in a very similar way; Sutherland as a 25-year old in about 1907 and Hemingway two decades later in 1929, aged 30. Born in 1899, Hemingway was 17 younger than Halliday Sutherland. However, written at about the same time, and published in the same year, 1932, Hemingway's prose has held up much better than Sutherland's.

The Arches of the Years is perhaps still of interest to readers who enjoy the style of Edwardian prose, and might like to read about Spain and bullfighting during that period, and an adventurous episode of the naval experience of the Great War. ( )